Fanny Gabor
Background Fanny Gabor is the mother to Melchior Gabor. She also considers herself second mother to Moritz Stiefel. She is an interesting character in Spring Awakening, as she is perhaps the only adult who displays a true desire to communicate with the children, and to understand where they are coming from. She is willing to talk to them like friends and to consider their needs and desire. Moritz Moritz has a close relationship with Frau Gabor; he sees her as a friend and a mother figure. Fanny tells Moritz to take it easy and to not put his studies in front of his health after having learned he was not sleeping in order to study. When Moritz discovers his failure in school he goes to her for money/a chance to escape; she reveals that she can not supply the money he requires in order to flee to America, but instead offers to write to his parents to help soften their punishment on him. Melchior Fanny Gabor had the primary authority in terms of raising Melchior. She tried to bring him up into a free and liberal environment, letting him learn and do as he pleases as to not stifle his growth ("surely, you boys are now of an age to decide for yourselves what is good for you and what is not"). After Moritz's death and Melchior's explusion from school, Fanny is opposed to the idea of punishing Melchior, as she doesn't believe that his "crude" essay should be seen as a crime. She focuses on the fact that Melchior is being made a scapegoat for Moritz's death by the school and by the town elders and does not believe that Melchior's "treatise" had anything to do with Moritz's suicide, to the point that she refers to Melchior's writing of the essay and his later sharing of it with Moritz as an act of naivtey ("Melchior wrote an essay-every word of which was true. Are we so afraid of the truth we will join the ranks of cowards and fools? Twisting his naive act into evidence against him?"). Eventually, Hermann Gabor is able to convince Fanny to send Melchior to the reformatory by showing her the letter that Melchior wrote to Wendla, which was given to Hermann by a distraught Frau Bergmann. In the musical, she's turned by knowing that Melchior not only slept with a young woman out of wedlock, despite knowing the consquences of such an action, and impregnated her, but also had no remorse for it and longed to do it again. In the play, Melchior uses the letter to apologize for raping Wendla and, after discovering that it's not a forgery and that Melchior had been trying to get money from Hermann's brother in order to escape to Britain, Fanny agrees to send him to a "house of correction" Fun Facts * Fanny's first name was changed to Clara in the UK rendition, due to the vulgar connotation of the word "fanny" in the UK. * Many actors play Moritz's relationship with Fanny as one where he's attracted to her, sometimes even in an oedipal sense where he still sees her as a mother but also as a sex symbol; this is due especially to the line "Well, your mother is certainly remarkable" from the pre-Touch Me scene mother 3.jpg mother 4.jpg mother 5.jpg mother 2.JPG mother 1.jpg Category:Character